Sen. Ken Salazar (CO-Idiot) was just kvetching that Palin was somebody "nobody's heard of".

Firstly, as I said, I was talking up Palin to my father in April. People who pay a lot of attention are criminally myopic if they've never heard of Palin. It's like never having heard of Sibelius or Napolitino.

Secondly, people who *don't* pay attention to politics aren't likely to hear of *any* second-tier VP-class politician. I asked my great-aunt the morning after the Biden pick if she'd ever heard of him. No, no she hadn't. Generally speaking, you're lucky if Joe Sixpack or Janet Housecoat knows 1) the current president and vice president 2) the speaker of the house 3) their own governor 4) their own senators.

McCain-Palin '08.

Huh. I believe I was telling my folks back in April that I thought she'd be the best choice McCain could make. I think I can live with that.

I went over to the Thompson campaign office on Allegheny Street yesterday afternoon for a campaign kick-off open house. There was an unfamiliar Mini Cooper with a Hillary sticker outside the office. It was there hours later, when I walked by coming back from the grocery store. It must have belonged to one of the campaign workers. That's taking Operation Chaos a bit far, don't you think? I didn't even keep a Bush/Cheney 2004 sticker on my car after the election - I had intentionally gotten a magnetic so that it could be easily removed afterwords.

Cars festooned with bumper stickers is a leftist affection. Campaign advertising is for the campaign season.

Speaking of which, when is that McCain running mate announcement going to happen? Can't put out campaign materials without the blipping running mate.

Oh, btw: Thompson's good with faces. He remembered me from the Bush campaign office in 2004.

I followed a link from the Corner to a Daily Kos post by Keith Obermann throwing Dana Milbank under his own personal bus, and noted in passing the comment count. 1019 comments.

1019.

Who could read that many comments, or even care to try? That's nuts!

Of course, taking an egotistical over-promoted ex-sportscaster as your own personal political redeemer is nuts in the first place, but good Zod people! Who has that kind of time?

So it's vice-presidential vetting season, and rumor has it that McCain will be announcing a running mate in the next week or so. I'm not sure if Obama's ready yet - from the number of people bounced off of his vetting committee for various subprime lending malfeances, I'm not even sure if he has a vetting committee in action, or whether they've decided to just run his ego for vice-president & moved on to planning the inevitable transition instead of worrying over minor details like VP candidates. Is "hack to be named later" a valid choice?

Anyways, everybody's thinking about McCain's best choices, which leaves me wondering about worst choices. What politicians or personalities would be guaranteed to cause their ticket to crash and burn in the most picturesque manner possible? For McCain, the bad choices are almost endless, although time and fickle fame have undermined some of the best jokes - does anybody even remember who Zell Miller or Trent Lott is these days? 2004 was such a long time ago... Ah. But it will take a true spirit of perversity to properly torpedo Obama in the second compartment. Whose baggage is heavy enough to fatally over-balance the UNS Audacity?

The most timely of bad choices would be, of course, John Edwards. "Ma, Ma, where's my pa?" I'd say something about the Obama people missing the scandal because of their reliance on the determinedly blind mainstream media, but of course, lefties just pretend to not read the tabloids. They'll know. Politicians may be too high in the instep to buy their own groceries, but their aides will have seen the National Enquirer covers the next time they pick up the boss's skim milk. But really, Edwards is kind of boring, even for a worst vice presidential pick, even with the two-time loser aspect of the choice.

Who's flashier? Bill Ayers, of course, but that's more of a dream-candidate for those of us who follow the wingnut commentariat, and anyways, he's not actually a politician, unless you consider terrorism to be politics by other means. Michelle Obama, for that trifeca of misguided "feminism means riding on a husband's coat-tails" pandering, sullen anti-Americanism, and complete and total political inexperience. But it's hard to picture Michelle Obama as a sort of Eva Peron/Cristina Fernandez figure. Harder than it was the she-Nixon, at any rate.

With the Countrywide thing having blown up so comprehensively, I think we'll be spared the prospect of a Dodd vice-presidency, which will make for a less sleep-inducing VP debate, if nothing else. Whom among the other Democratic presidential '08 candidates would be crazed enough to keep us awake? Kucinich is almost plausible, if you honestly believe that the nutroots are pissed enough by the gestures towards the rightward tack since HC bowed out. Utterly and totally nuts, but plausable. And hey - Ohio! Favorite son! Remember when they used to put favorite sons in the VP slot, and it actually worked? When was the last time that happened? 1996, I guess.

But you know, few really plausable VP presidential choices for Obama are hole-beneath-the-water-line disasters. Sibelius, or Napolitano have few serious down-sides that I'm aware of, and although Bill Richardson supposedly has some dreadful portrait-of-Dorian-Gray in the attic that pundits like Mickey Kaus love to drop horrid hints about, I can't imagine it was that bad without it having come out during the Obama-HC hatefest in the spring. There are *tons* of female Democratic governors to choose from, and none of them are likely to blow up the campaign. Some are even red-state figures. Although really, I don't think Napolitano's Arizona is in play this year, any more than Palin's Alaska is.

I started out planning on making fun of McCain-Lieberman (speaking of two-time losers) or McCain-Helms (nothing like a dead racist to make a live Republican look progressive in comparison) or even McCain-Ventura (Why pretend to be Republican any more? Parties are dead!). But I realize now that the only choice McCain could surprise me with is McCain-Romney. Because really, anything would be an improvement on the expected choice.

But why listen to me? What do I know? I loved the idea of Kemp in 1996.

Jack's probably still available for another run.

Wow. Dark Knight is a hell of a ride. Some pretty ugly philosophy and politics coiling in its bitter heart, but then we always knew that there was a fascist core to the Batman mythos, didn't we?

Weird thing? Batman himself almost disappears from the movie. The focus is so tight on all the secondary characters and villains that the nominal protagonist disappears over the event horizon. By the end of the movie, Bruce Wayne and his alter ego are like a black hole, disappearing within the abyssal requirements of the story. Batman becomes the abyss. I like that.

I'm impressed with how they used Harvey Dent. It works much better than what I was afraid they'd do with the character.

I'm a little worried about how much there is to the movie. I left the theatre thinking about how we have to drive up the intensity of everything any more - how what was very simple becomes with time either more and more baroque, or in the case of Dark Knight, condensed and concentrated. There's just so much story compressed into the film, that it feels like the material for three Seventies-era movies. But the story isn't rushed, or cluttered, or spackled-together like last year's Spiderman 3. The script & editing are a clockwork marvel of syncronization and economy.

Watchmen's trailer looks impressive. Actuallly, it looks a lot better than the actual comic, which honestly wasn't all that polished or artistically distinguished. Watchmen's virtues lay in the writing, and in layout itself. Now that I think about it, the Watchmen trailer looks like the version of the comic which might have been produced if the art had been given to one of the Nineties gold-foil crowd instead of Dave Gibbons.

No blood for uranium!

Now if the greentards would just let us build some pebblebed reactors to put the booty to use...

Congratulations, Supreme Court! You've put yourself in a position where reputable and otherwise-rational members of the public are approvingly quoting Andrew Jackson on the subject of respecting your decisions. It takes some work to put modern-day PC-sensitized responsible adults in the same camp with the architect of the Trail of Tears.

I can't express just how stupid this is. In 2000? The Court pissed off the die-hard Democratic partisans. In 2008? Anyone who actually gives a damn about the military and foreign policy (as opposed to those who think of foreign policy as an extension of their moral self-regard). What are you going to do in 2012? Well, some of you won't be doing anything other than obeying the second law of thermodynamics, because the probabilities approach unity that one of you senile old wrecks will kick the bucket before then, but God only knows what monstrous idiocy the collective Court will be capable of if the Obamanation has the appointing of your successors, un-restrained by a Republican majority in the Senate.

And if you think there's a Republican majority in the cards for either house in the next four years, I've got a house in Mogadishu for sale. I'm sure it'll appreciate in value once the war's over, right?

Well, the Seventies are making a comeback. They're talking about stagflation, and the guys at work who live in Toftrees are trying to make a carpool work. I don't have to 'pool, because I walk to work. It'd be nice to walk up with other folk, but nobody from town seems into it.

Oh, and I'm never buying milk from Dollar General again. This is the second or third time that a half-gallon's gone sour on me before it was more than three-fifths used. Waste of money....

Obama's channeling Preston Brooks now? Makes sense, given that he's a Democratic descendant of slave-owning border ruffians.

Cicadas all over the sidewalks down in town. Ugly little things, look more like a cross between coachroaches and hornets than your usual flat-black cicada model. Yech.

So, I promised a discussion of Franceschi and Weider's the Wars Against Napoleon. I greatly regretted this promise, because it required I actually finish the book, a task which I would have just as well let drop uncompleted. Even if I did pay hardback prices for the thrice-blasted thing.

The book is being sold as a revisionist work arguing the diplomatic case of Napoleon I's innocence and genuinely peaceable nature. This would be a substantial burden for the most scholarly and clever of authors, as Napoleon has become a by-word in the English-speaking world as an aggressor, a tyrant, and a degenerate. Franceschi and Weider are neither clever, nor do they demonstrate any scholarly characteristics, I must report.

First of all, diplomatic history is a long-winded and detailing sort of affair. I should have been well-warned to note that this work of diplomatic history was barely more than two hundred pages long. What detail is contained within its few pages tends more towards the military, than the diplomatic. Perhaps the authors were confused by the word "Wars" in their title, and concluded that they were obliged to include great swathes of text about the operational and tactical events of Napoleon's many, many campaigns. Nevertheless, in a book proporting to tear the diplomatic mask from the warlike visage of the Bonaparte family's wicked royalist enemies, the material on diplomacy and politics is sparse, spotty, and underwhelming. We get barely three pages on Tilsit, two or three pages scattered here and there on Amiens, and maybe a page and a half on Luneville. A few paragraphs here and there about Campoformio, etc. Meanwhile, the maneuvering behind the establishment of the myriad Bonapartist puppet-states justifying what still looks to me like Napoleon's many aggressions and invasions are airly dismissed with bald nonsense which the North Korean's propagandists would blush to commit to print.

For instance, this on the enthroning of a Bonaparte brother over the Netherlands:

On the institutional plane, the Dutch threw themselves into the arms of Revolutionary France to escape the stadholders (governors of the country.) At the time, the Netherlands had a republican regime presided by the "Grand Pensioner" Schimmelpenninck. In 1806 the Batavian authorities took advantage of their leader's illness to request of Napoleon that he give them his brother Joseph as king. Joseph had earned their respect the previous year while commanding a Franco-Dutch corps. The proclamation was issued on June 5.

Thus was one of the oldest republics in Europe placed under a monarchy by the banner-carriers of the revolutionary Rights of Man!

Kindly note, the lack of citation in the above quote. There is none. In the entire book. Apparently the authors received their enlightenment on the subject via divine revelation, because there is no worldly credit given anywhere outside the obsequious acknowledgments contained within the brief preface. Not even quotes from correspondence and contemporary works are properly cited such that a reader not inclined to take the authors at their word might consult the originals.

This book is an act of contrascholasticism. The authors appear actively contemptuous of the notion of active readership, of the idea that their book might act as any sort of gateway for a journey deeper into the subject. Their word is, apparently final.

They also seem disinclined to persuade or convince an uncertain or open-minded audience. The text is littered with rhetorical, unearned daggers flung at the enemies of Napoleon, often out of context. Bernadotte, the general who turned against Napoleon once he became Crown Prince of Sweden, never appears in the text without an accompanying shriek of rage against his eventual betrayal of the peaceable emperor. Every other personage of note who did not stand with Napoleon until Saint Helena are likewise pummelled about their unworthy heads and shoulders.

Look, I was willing to entertain the idea that the monarchs of Europe were perfidious and brought Napoleon's catastrophes upon their own heads. Hell, I bought the book, didn't I? But once you wade through two hundred pages of:

In foreign affairs, the domain more relevant to our subject, Napoleon's first concern was to reassure the European monarchies. He attempted to disarm their hysterical hostility by informing them that he accepted the Treaty of Paris, thereby indicating that he renounced any claim to reconquer the frontiers of 1792 and instead engaged to respect those of 1789.

it becomes difficult to maintain equanimity and balance. Oh, and please note - the above was a description of the diplomatic maneuvers during "Hundred Days", and Napoleon fought the whole of that spring's campaign in Belgium, which is decidedly on the wrong side of the 1789 borders.

Really, this book is naked apologetic. They write to defend their hero, against every insult ever essayed by an opponent. Check this out - this is their defense of the then-Consul's slaughter of prisoners in Jaffa during the Egyptian campaign:

Confronted with a fait accompli, Bonaparte found himself in a nightmarish issue of conscience. Already suffering from a shortage of provisions for his soldiers, he was unable to feed this additional mass of humanity under any circumstances. Nor could he spare sufficient soldiers to guard them, being cruelly undermanned as a result of operations. Simply to abandon these men to their fate would be to condemn them to a slow and horrible death in the desert. Finally, in the rigid oriental mindset, any measure of clemency would be perceived as a weakeness of will tha would probably encourage even more ferocious resistence in future combats. It was thus that Bonaparte was obliged to resolve his moral crisis by taking the terrible decision to exterminate the prisoners under indescribable conditions.

What a prince.

In short, this book leaves me more ignorant of the subject than I was when I first opened its leaves. What few new facts one might glean from the authors' presentation are so compromised by their unrelenting partisanship, refusal to cite sources, and blatant bias that I find myself unable to accept any of it as true. Their endorsement of interpretations I've encountered previously have undermined the legitimacy of said interpretations by that very endorsement.

In short, I regret that I ever encountered this horrid little volume of pestiferous Bonapartist propaganda.

Dude.

Oh, and btw? The Wars Against Napoleon is shaping up to be a ripe piece of unaddorned sophistry, a bare-bones apologia for tyranny. I'm regretting having bought it. I'll have to track back to see who talked me into it - it was either someone on the Corner or Dimitri, I think.

Huh. Iron Man's playing at the Garman tonight. Sounds like a plan.

So it's National History Day season, and the Valentine Hill Road was echoing this fine morning with the outraged bellows of yours truly, reading his way through the senior papers. Vietnam War papers. [shudder]

So I've been watching fansubs of the first season of Space Battleship Yamato. It's more fun than I had expected, but lord, the science! The continuity errors! The enemy race changes *skin color* ten episodes into the show! With no in-story explanation why the Gamilons were a healthy pink until the Pluto base was destroyed! Well, except for that subordinate of Desslar's - he was always a sickly purple. There's no women on board the Yamato, except for one episode, where they're all over the place, then after that, it's just Yuki again. The travel-times make my head ache, and the galactic geography makes the original Battlestar Galactica seem reasonable and rational in comparison.

But on the other hand, you've got mad Seventies futuristic designs, great music, those trippy Matsumoto characters, and Captain Okita. Gotta love Captain Okita. And Sanada, grinning suicidally as he blows up the Gamilon-trap-of-the week with bombs in his own prosthetic limbs. He rocks.

Fred: Obama will say any pin-headed thing he feels like on foreign affairs, so long as it doesn't require him to actually follow through with any of it. I'm not president or running for president; if I say "invade Pakistan!", it'd just be some fool saying something stupid on the internet. Obama, on the other hand, had somebody mis-brief him & blurted out, stupidly, some idiocy about invading a nominal allied state during the campaign season.

The reason that Pakistan is such a hellacious problem is that they're nominally our allies. (Same with the Saudis, but the Royal Family isn't a nuclear power. Yet.) Without causus belli, we can't out-right invade the technically sovereign state of Pakistan. The CIA crawls all over that county with the half-hearted connivance of the Pakistanis - there was one heck of a wild-west show in the Kyber Agency recently. We conduct quiet cross-border attacks all the time. But I *don't* think we should declare open war on the Frontier Agencies. It's not the delicate or nuanced way to go about things.

But more importantly, Afghanistan isn't a cultural or political priority. Afghanistan is a proxy to a proxy, at least two removes from the strategic pivot. All we can do in Afghanistan is kill jihadis. More importantly, we can *lose* in Afghanistan, but we can't win there. It's an attritional fight, and the modern United States isn't a power which can win on attritional terms. It only works if we change our terms, our definitions. Afghanistan is far enough out of the Islamic heartland that it'll never register as anything other than "an affair of posts". You can win hearts and minds locally in Afghanistan proper, but what you do in that country won't swing the Islamic public regionally or internationally one way or the other.

Iraq is the emotional heartland of the modern Islamic world, or at least as close as we can get without waging war on a nominal sovereign allied state. And last year the Salafis wrecked themselves in front of the Muslim world, right in the heart of the old caliphate. They butchered and they slaughtered and they demonstrated their ideals before the cameras.

Iraq was where we could show the Islamic world a choice of definitions: does "Muslim" mean takfirism, salafism? Or are the Takfiri devil-worshipers, nihilistic, solipistic, savages, criminals - safely *not Muslim*?

I'm sanguine about Iraq because it looks like Iraq broke the Sunni regional threat. Since last summer, it's been a worry about whether there would be a count-rout and regional civil war between the resurgent Shia trends - the "Shia Crescent" - and a beaten Sunni cultural trend. The unexpected "Iranian subversion" mini-civil war seems to have put paid to the threat of the "Shia Crescent", though.

On a related note, I'm having difficulty figuring out what the heck happened last month in Basra and Sadr City, but there are a couple of alternate interpretations.

1) The various Iranian-suborned groups in the Iraqi Shia community had a falling-out-between-thieves, and the Iranians tried to salvage the situation by throwing the Sadrists to the wolves.
2) al Maliki had a sudden surge of patriotic feeling, and decided to assert national control over Basra.
3) Sadr failed to impress anyone in Teheran with his ability to mobilize the masses, and the fighting was *started* by Iranian intervention, against Sadr.
4) al Maliki and SIIC finally gave in to American badgering, and decided to reconcile with the Sunni Awakening folks by waging their own little demonstrative war-against-terrrorists-and-takfiri. Sadr, being the least politically apt and by far the youngest and dumbest of Shia powerbrokers, got chosen as the judas goat for this demonstration. The governmental Shia factions, having fought and won a much more conventional war against their own head-choppers and lunatics, are now exploiting an opportunity to meet on common terms with the newly-sympathetic Sunni Awakening community leaders.

I like #4 much more than the other explanations of what's going on. It explains what happened to the abortive "Shia Awakening" movement from last winter. If the Shias in government let that go on for too long, they would have failed to protect their phoney-baloney jobs. In order to avoid another bottom-up counter-insurgency, they and the Iranians are colluding to make the pacification of the south a top-down national project. It *sounds* like the Iranians may have out-maneuvered themselves, though. And there was always a chance that the Iranians would shoot themselves in the foot like this. Whenever you try to buy everybody in a factional snake-pit, you end up buying nobody; because all the factions are bought off equally, none of them feel beholden for the money and support delivered. Aid becomes tribute when it is expected, and leverage depends upon uncertainty.

Huh, long weekends.

I'm feeling kind of optimistic about the war this morning, but then, I haven't read the news sites yet this morning. I'm going to put a placer down and say that I believe that we're winning in Iraq today, and that it'll finally settle down into a low-level series of terroristic outbursts and border flareups with Iran. I'm not as sanguine about the prospect of war with Iran, and the ongoing deterioration of Afghanistan. We've ceded a certain amount of control in Afghanistan to NATO, so to one degree or another that situation is kind of out of control, and that's always worrisome. One of the things I'll be looking for in a future administration is a healthy re-engagement with Afghanistan, and the proxy-war with Pakistan's demons which "Afghanistan" represents.

I spent part of this last weekend talking with a once-estranged friend who's going to be deploying to Iraq by the end of the year with one of the new Stryker brigades. He seems pretty optimistic, but then, he hasn't been actively deployed since the second year of the Bosnia deployment. I didn't hear anything I haven't been hearing elsewhere in my own little personal echo-chamber, so take that as you will.

But Fred, I can't imagine that it's a good idea to use adjectives like "savage" when talking about Muslims, Shia or Sunni. Words have meaning, and I like to reserve such explosive and loaded terms for actual savages, like the takfiri and the terrorists and the criminals hired by both.

Huh. The Clearfield wallah beat my-neighbor-the-carpetbagger. Guess I'll definitely be voting Republican in the generals, unless this Thompson fellow turns out to be a sheep-molester or something like that. And, since they seem to have done well enough in shaking the trees & emptying the closets of skeletons - Walker, sucks to be you, dude - I'm guessing that possibility is pretty slight.

But it's not good when the Democrats roll out more primary votes than the Republicans in such a traditionally Republican, rural district, especially when the Republican congressional race is that heavily-contested. About 69.5k to more than 71k? Not good, folks. Pennsyltucky is starting to go blue in the face.

And yes, the Shrew made her numbers. It's gonna go to a second ballot at the least. Woo-hoo! Contested convention!

Can we lock the gates behind them?